Finding a Way

By SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM

Published: February 11, 2011

From the very first sentence of his unusual memoir, “House of Prayer No. 2,” Mark Richard brings together the vernacular and the performative. “Say you have a ‘special child,’ ” the book begins, at once inviting us in folksy terms to suppose this to be the case and commanding us to summon the child into existence through the sheer act of saying so. The opening pages, Genesis-like, call the child’s world into being, his early life created via a series of severe directives: “Birth him with his father away” and “Move the family to a tobacco county in Southside Virginia” and “Make the ­mother cry and miss her mother.” The special child in question, we come to understand, is Richard himself. It’s an uncommon way to introduce the protagonist of a memoir, but an apt way to frame this absorbing account of growing up in the 1960s South, living with a disability, becoming a writer and finding faith. Richard’s book attests to the power of words (and the Word) in shaping a life, while at the same time challenging some dearly held beliefs about memoir as a genre.

Jeff Vespa

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Richard was a “special” child in several senses, and he beautifully demonstrates how this word, especially as it was used in the South, is roomy enough to accommodate contradictory meanings. The child is special because he bites strangers at parties but also because he sees an angel pass through the living room on Easter morning. One teacher predicts future greatness, while others suspect he “might be retarded.” He can read aloud from a college chemistry textbook by the age of 6, but is considered “slow” because he can’t correctly color the state bird. He is also special because of the congenital hip problems that land him for long spells in the Crippled Children’s Hospital, where he endures torturous operations and slow, immobile recoveries inside a body cast.

This special childhood results in considerable powers of observation, empathy and imagination. Flannery O’Connor said, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one,” and among Richard’s gifts is the affinity he feels for the freaks and special children of the world. He soon discovers his knack for writing their stories and — after stints as a deckhand on a scallop trawler, an aerial photographer, an editor of a small military newspaper and an envelope-stuffer for Ralph Nader — begins to find fitful success as an author. He is forthright about the fact that a writer can have his first book (“The Ice at the Bottom of the World”) bought by the venerable Alfred A. Knopf, receive the PEN/Hemingway Award from Norman Mailer, be seated next to Jackie Onassis at the award dinner, and still not have health insurance or enough money to feed himself. Richard follows that first book with two more, all the while supporting his fiction habit with visiting-writer gigs at universities, articles for Esquire and, after moving to California, work in television and film.

The journey from an odd and difficult childhood to a literary career is not unfamiliar, but the method by which Richard charts his path is unconventional. What’s most striking in his account is the total absence of an “I.” One could argue that the power of memoir stems from the act of bearing witness — from both the intimacy and the authority of the first-person voice — and that a memoir’s appeal lies largely in the tone of that voice. Yet Richard deliberately chooses detachment over intimacy or winsomeness.

The first seven or eight years of his life are narrated in a cool, all-knowing third person, with the special child never referred to by name and his parents referred to only as “the mother” and “the father.” Once the special child realizes his talent for spinning tales — his teacher reads his first story, “The Ancient Castle,” out loud to his second-grade class — the narration shifts from third to second person, seemingly bringing us closer to the character. But second person is a peculiar (or “special”) perspective. On the one hand, it’s a fully immersive point of view, demanding that readers take on another’s experiences as their own. On the other hand, it creates a sense of remoteness, almost disembodiment, as if the narrator is hovering just outside the self. Which may be, of course, exactly what it feels like to grow up in a seriously impaired body. It’s a point of view that both insists upon, and resists, closeness.

As anyone who’s read his fiction already knows, Richard is a fiercely gifted writer. Recalling the charity hospital where he spent so much time, he creates vivid and immediate scenes, as when students from the local barber college give the kids haircuts: “The barbers come whistling with jokes and songs and gum, and they touch you, cradle your heads in their hands as they trim, hold you in their arms so you can safely lean over the edge of the bed in your body casts as they open your faces with their scissors.” In other passages, however, the second person and the present tense flatten rather than heighten the moment. The style allows minimal commentary or reflection, so the episodes must speak for themselves. Often they do speak, and eloquently — particularly the scenes from Richard’s childhood. But once we leave that strange and sensory realm, the storytelling loses its intensity. We experience much of Richard’s adulthood as one long string of dive bars and crash pads and odd jobs and girlfriends, the narrative busy yet reticent, giving us a lot of information but shining little light on it.

But maybe darkness is what Richard is after, the necessary prologue to the spiritual awakening that occupies the end of his book. Again, he is laconic about the epiphany; we learn simply that while he is walking alone in the Tennessee woods, he gets “the call to ministry.” After a few thwarted attempts to enroll in a seminary, he stumbles on an unexpected outlet for “this thing that has been placed on” his heart: his Cajun, lapsed-Catholic mother has joined a black Pentecostal church in his hometown, and they need a new building. Richard finds himself deeply involved in making this a reality, holding regular consultations with the pastor, buying bricks and shingles and tools, ordering food for the convicts doing the construction. His story of how the House of Prayer No. 2 gets built — despite financial obstacles and legal setbacks, and with the help of multiple small miracles along the way — becomes his means of testifying, and it’s a powerful one. When the church is close to completion and the pastor’s elderly mother “lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are slain in the spirit,” I felt a shiver pass through my body, and suddenly the memoir’s reticence, its desultory movement, its use of second person, revealed their purpose to me. To understand the mystery of faith, you cannot be told it; you must experience it yourself.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s most recent book is “Ms. Hempel Chronicles.”

A version of this review appeared in print on February 13, 2011, on page BR25 of the Sunday Book Review.